Cerny’s Adobe Photoshop Tutorial – Part 3: The Main Bar – Edit

In the previous tutorial you learned about the “File” menu in Adobe Photoshop. Now it’s time to move on to the “Edit” menu.

 1.2 The “Edit” menu

As you can notice, it has a lot of options, just like the “File” menu. In the following lines I will describe you what each of them do.

1.2.1 “Undo” This can undo the last step and the last step only. If pressed twice it will revert back to the shape before the undo.

1.2.2 “Step Forward” This redoes what you have undid.

1.2.3 “Step Backward” This is the most used one, and is best used from keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Z; “Step Backward” has the ability to undo your steps multiple times.

1.2.4 “Fade” has the ability to reduce your last modification’s (brush, erease, effect, filter, color adjustment, etc.) opacity.

1.2.5 “Cut” Cuts the selected area in your current layer of your document.

1.2.6 “Copy” Copies the selected area in your current layer of your document.

1.2.7 “Copy merged” Copies the seleceted area from all your layers in the document.

1.2.8 “Paste” Plain old paste tool.

1.2.9 “Paste special” has 3 options: paste in place, paste into, paste outside. This basically alows you to paste something inside or outside of the selected area.

1.2.10 “Clear” Acts like a “Cut” tool, but without the paste possibility after. It deletes the selected area.

1.2.11 “Check spelling” Acts like a spell checker when you write something.

1.2.12 “Find and replace text” Searches for the desired text and replaces it with something you want.

1.2.13 “Fill” Fills the selected area with a color of user’s choice. If nothing is selected, then the whole layer is filled with a color.

1.2.14 “Content-Aware scale” Content-Aware Scale resizes an image without changing important visual content such as people, buildings, animals, and so on. While normal scaling affects all pixels uniformly when resizing an image, content-aware scaling mostly affects pixels in areas that don’t have important visual content. 

1.2.15 “Puppet Warp” Is a tool that enhances your ability of wraping images. For example:

We have this image. If you click the “Puppet wrap” a grid will appear:

What you can do now is add anchor points.

What you can do now is move these points separately, without affecting the rest:

1.2.16 “Free Transform” Is a tool thal lets you resize, rotate and flip the selected area, or an entire layer. The keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl+T, and it’s widely used. To keep the aspect/ratio of the transformed item, press Alt + Shift while transforming. When rotating, keep Shift pressed for rotating only 15 degrees at once. Also, if you keep Ctrl presed, you can move just the corner of the image, wraping it the way you want. Doing this helps you achieve a perspective look of the item you’re transforming.

1.2.17 “Transform” contains a few basic transform options, like flip, scale, rotate, etc.

1.2.18 “Auto-Align Layers” Is a tool that can merge your layers into a panorama.

1.2.19 “Auto-Blend Layers” Photoshop adjusts the exposure and white balance of each image and prepares a layer mask with gradients between images. This is used after merging your photos in a panorama, for a finished look and a more gentle pass from a picture to another, a better binding. This makes your images look like a single picture.

1.2.20 “Define Brush Preset” Using any selection tool, select the image area you want to use as a custom brush. The brush shape can be up to 2500 pixels by 2500 pixels in size.

1.2.21 “Define Pattern” A pattern is an image that is repeated, or tiled, when you use it to fill a layer or selection.

1.2.22 “Define Costum Shape” Is basically like a brush, with more preset shapes. With this, you can create your own shapes. You create shapes using the “Pen” tool, on wich we will come back later.

1.2.23 “Purge” Deletes the history of what you have modified on your document, thus disableing you to undo changes done before the purge.

1.2.24 “Adobe PDF presets” Opens up a list of PDF presets for saving your document as a PDF file, which can be edit later on using Adobe Photoshop.

1.2.24 “Preset Manager” Opens up this window:

This allows you to manage your current presets (brushes, shapes, patterns, etc.). Loading new presets downloaded from the internet, deleting existing ones, saving a some of them in a sepparate set, these are just a few functions of the “Preset Manager”.

1.2.25 “Color Settings” Opens up a window with a few color adjustments which allow you to a better print and display quality.

1.2.26 “Assing Profile” Assign Profile lets you tag an image with a specified profile or untag an image by removing its profile. It doesn’t do any conversions; it simply attaches a description to the numbers in the image, or removes one.

1.2.27 “Convert to Profile” As its name suggests, lets you convert a document from its profile space (or, in the case of an untagged document, the current working space) to any other profiled space, with full control over how the conversion is done.

1.2.28 “Keyboard Shortcuts” If you click it, a window will pop up:

Here you can view/edit the keyboard shortcuts to tools, panel menus and application menus.

1.2.29 “Menu” Opens up a window:

Here you can choose to show or hide some items in the menu. If you think there are too many items in the menus, and you don’t use them all, you can choose to hide them, for a faster work.

1.2.30 “Preferences” :

Here you can edit your Photoshop settings, as it can be seen in the image above.

Well, that was it for this time, please come back later on for the part number 4! Thank you very much for reading.